Free Republic

Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. Eight million Israelis are surrounded by some 400 million Muslims in more than 20 states. Almost all of Israel's neighbors are anti-Israeli dictatorships, monarchies or theocracies-- a number of them reduced to a state of terrorist chaos. Given the rise of radical Islam, the huge petrodollar wealth of the Middle East and lopsided demography, how has Israel so far survived? The Jewish state has always depended on three unspoken assumptions for its tenuous existence. First, a democratic, nuclear Israel can deter larger enemies. In the Cold War,...

Western civilization's creed is free thought and expression, the lubricant of everything from democracy to human rights. Even a simpleton in the West accepts that protecting free expression is not the easy task of ensuring the right to read Homer's "Iliad" or do the New York Times crossword puzzle. It entails instead the unpleasant duty of allowing offensive expression. Westerners fight against pornography, blasphemy or hate speech in the arena of ideas by writing and speaking out against such foul expression. They are free to sue, picket, boycott, and pressure sponsors of unwelcome speech. But Westerners cannot return to the...

Fueling the Western paralysis in dealing with radical Islam is the late 20th century doctrine of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is one of those buzzwords that does not mean what it should. The ancient and generic Western study of many cultures is not multiculturalism. Rather, the trendy term promotes non-Western cultures to a status equal with or superior to Western culture largely to fulfill contemporary political agendas. On college campuses, multiculturalism not so much manifests itself in the worthy interest in Chinese literature, Persian history, or hieroglyphics, but rather has become more a therapeutic exercise of exaggerating Western sins while ignoring non-Western...

Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class. Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy – minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation – protected their interests better than unfettered free-market capitalism. Republicans often had trouble selling the argument that an unleashed economy and new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition – something like suffering with a cheap outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off afforded an iPhone 6. Why, then, have Democrats lost the working class – especially white, lower-middle-class voters? There are several obvious reasons. For...

A gentrified cocoon of progressive privilege has cost Democrats the middle class. Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class. Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy — minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation — protected their interests better than unfettered free-market capitalism. Republicans often had trouble selling the argument that an unleashed economy and new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition — something like suffering with a cheap, outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off could afford an iPhone 6. Why, then, have Democrats lost the...

Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class. Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy -- minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers' compensation -- protected their interests better than unfettered free-market capitalism. Republicans often had trouble selling the argument that an unleashed economy and new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition -- something like suffering with a cheap outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off afforded an iPhone 6. Why, then, have Democrats lost the working class -- especially white, lower-middle-class voters? There are several obvious reasons.

In his “fourth quarter,” he feels free to ignore popular opinion, the rule of law, and Congress. Until now there were two types of peaceful American change. One was a president, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, working with Congress to alter American life from the top down by passing a new agenda. The other was popular-reform pressure, as happened in the 1890s or 1960s, to change public opinion and force government to make new laws or change existing ones. Barack Obama has introduced a quite different, third sort of revolution. He seeks to enact change that both the...

One way of reinventing reality is to warp the meaning of words. No president in memory has waged such a war on the English language as has Barack Obama — changing the meaning of vocabulary to hide what he fears might otherwise be unpopular.

There are lots of hypocrisies surrounding the recently released executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program. But they pale in comparison to the current Democratic silence about President Barack Obama's policy of targeted drone assassinations. Since 2004, drones have killed an estimated 2,400 to 3,888 individuals in Pakistan alone, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London. An estimated 345 to 553 individuals in Yemen have been killed in drone strikes over the same period. The BIJ reports that the Obama administration has "markedly stepped up the use of drones. Since...

Well aside from “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” or blanket amnesty that is and is not lawful for a president to grant, there is a special category of progressive mythology. Or rather a particular cast of “truth tellers,” victims, supposed whistle blowers, and popular liberal icons who spin tales for a supposedly higher good, on the premise that untruth for a cause makes it sort of true. From the details of Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir, to Tawana Brawley’s supposed rape, to the O. J. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” myth, to the open-and-shut case...

<p>Often, crazy things seem normal for a time because logical catastrophes do not immediately follow.</p> <p>A deeply suspicious Richard Nixon systematically and without pushback for years undermined and politicized almost every institution of the federal government, from the CIA and the FBI to the IRS and the attorney general’s office. Nixon seemed to get away with it — until his second term. Once the public woke up, however, the eventual accounting proved devastating: resignation of a sitting president, prison sentences for his top aides, collapse of the Republican party, government stasis, a ruined economy, the destruction of the Vietnam peace accords that had led to a viable South Vietnam, the end of Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic breakthroughs, and a generation of abject cynicism about government. Did Nixon ever grasp that such destruction was the natural wage of his own paranoia?</p>

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki cannot get a handle on the recent scandalous treatment of veterans in VA hospitals, where more than 40 sick men were allowed to die without proper follow-up treatment. A cover-up allegedly followed. When the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal broke under the George W. Bush administration, heads rolled. So far, Shinseki seems immune from similar accountability. Almost nothing that former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius promised before, during or after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act came true. She was also cited by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel for...

This weekend I missed my first posting at PJ Media since beginning in 2006. Why? Let me briefly explain the lapse — if I can be forgiven for comparing a bike accident with what I have seen on the farm the last 50 years (sliced off fingers, crushed legs, herbicide poisonings, manifold burns, etc.). I was going on a usual morning bike ride — safe stuff with like-minded older folks. I’m 60; so is my biking partner and fellow Hoover Institution associate Bruce Thornton. We are hardly reckless. (Not like sulfuring at midnight recklessly in one’s 20s in the old...

Hard physical work is still a requisite for a sound outlook on an ever more crazy world. I ride a bike; but such exercise is not quite the same, given that the achievement of doing 35 miles is therapeutic for the body and mind, but does not lead to a sense of accomplishment in the material sense — a 30-foot dead tree cut up, a shed rebuilt, a barn repainted. I never quite understood why all these joggers in Silicon Valley have immigrants from Latin America doing their landscaping. Would not seven hours a week spent raking and pruning be...

In his first term President Obama was criticized for trash-talking the one-percenters while enjoying the aristocracy of Martha's Vineyard and the nation's most exclusive golf courses. Obama never quite squared his accusations that "millionaires and billionaires" had not paid their fair share with his own obvious enjoyment of the perks of "corporate jet owners," "fat cat bankers" and Las Vegas junketeers. Now, that paradox has continued right off the bat in the second term. In the State of the Union, Obama once more went after "the few," and "the wealthiest and the most powerful," whom he blasted as the "well-off...

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-100-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power...

A large war is looming absent preventive American vigilance The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising....

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous -- in a way we've seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon -- and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power...

There is a humane, transparent, truthful -- and constitutional -- way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama's unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things. Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010, yet he did nothing, in fear of punishment at the polls. Nor did Obama push amnesty in 2011 or 2012, afraid of hurting his own re-election chances. Worries over sabotaging Democratic chances in the 2014 midterms explain his inaction...

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud. Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the "stupidity" of Americans as a way to justify misleading them. Gruber apparently thinks such deception is OK because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage. Unfortunately, Gruber's disdain for the proverbial masses -- he was paid nearly $400,000 in consulting fees -- is thematic of the last...